Ted's Analysis

Happy Wednesday, friends. I watched the film of the Kansas City game Tuesday night, and I was pretty surprised by what I saw in the All-22 view, because it went against the notion I had from watching the TV feed in real-time.

That is, I thought the Chiefs played a lot of single-high safety with an eighth man in the box to stop the run, and crowd short routes. You can't see the alignment of the safeties very well on the live view, and the outcome of the game (lots of deep passing by the Broncos, limited success running the ball) supported my thinking.

After all, the previous week, the Patriots stayed in two-deep all game, and contested every short route in front of it, trying to beat up the Broncos' receivers. That's how you get Knowshon Moreno running 37 times for 224 yards; the offense takes what the defense is giving it.

Happy Sunday, friends. I had some time materialize on my calendar yesterday, so I used it to watch the Patriots’ last two games.

In Week 9, they hung a franchise-worst 55 points on the Steelers, and won 55-31, and in Week 11, they lost a hard-fought game to the Panthers, on what was frankly a screwjob call by the officials as the clock expired.

The Steelers game was a clear outlier among a ragged group of offensive performances this season, and everything worked well in that game, as they had for Patriots teams of past years. Against the better Panthers defense, the Patriots had a harder time stringing together the drives they had two weeks earlier.

Happy Sunday, friends. I'm into crunch time on studying for the tax section of the CPA exam, and I have some other stuff going on too, so I apologize for my recent scarceness. Since it's football Sunday, and since my brain needs a break from thinking about the calculation of taxable basis, I decided to answer a recent question from a reader. From Bryan:

Can Ted please do a write up about this "pick and rub" route thing? What the heck are pick and rub routes? Why are the chef fans all up in arms about them being illegal, and are they? Pleez to be 'splainin dis

Sure thing, Bryan. The first thing I'd say is that we need to level-set the vocabulary words, because the mainstream explainers of football tend to confuse the issues by using the wrong words:

Happy Friday, friends. Our longtime reader Mike Birtwistle asked me on Twitter to take a look at the Broncos defense, and to try to get some perspective into the conversation. He's noticed a lot of hand-wringing by Broncos fans on Twitter, and his view is that this defense isn't really all that bad.

Before we try to evaluate the Broncos defense, let's try to understand what it means to have a good defense.

In order to do that, let's start with offense. All the time, we hear that the NFL is a passing league. When I Googled that, I got about 37 million results for it. The top result was an article by retired LB Scott Fujita (who is way too intelligent and reasonable to be working at FOX) about how the NFL got to be a passing league. Hit the jump, and we'll look at it.

Happy Wedneday, friends. I got started watching the All-22 video last night, but unfortunately, I got sidetracked from finishing it. For today, I thought we'd look at a key play from the Broncos/Eagles game, and break down why it worked.

It's funny, because I criticize Troy Aikman's broadcasting skills, but he actually didn't do a bad job of spotting what happened here, and explaining it live. I think there's a bit more to what he had to say, though, and that seeing the whole thing is instructive for our readers.

The play in question is Wes Welker's first TD reception of the game, which made the score 7-0, Broncos. It was 3rd-and-2 from the Eagles' six-yard line, and the Broncos ran a concept that was highly likely to at least pick up the first down. Based on Philly's defensive tactics, it became an almost guaranteed TD.

Happy Friday, friends. Rather than doing a Digesting article about the Eagles today, I decided to look at the big question: is their offense a fad, or does it have staying power? Nothing gets football talkers more riled up than speculating on whether new tactics can work over the long haul in the NFL.

Most of them are of the default belief that nothing new can ever work. I’m sure that, in their early days, that was said about innovations like the 3-4 defense, or the zone-blitz, or the shotgun. The reality is that some new stuff works, and some of it is relegated to the dustbin of history.

And then you have something like the Run and Shoot, that worked well for a while, and then ostensibly faded away, but quietly, its principles are still quite common to this day.

Today, I’m going to explain why the Chip Kelly design works, and why it will continue to work in the NFL on an ongoing basis. Hit the jump, and we’ll get to the bottom of this.

The NFL's trade deadline is still 4.5 weeks away (4pm ET on Tue, Oct 29), and no team (except for the Browns) is ready to cut bait on 2013.

Of course, trades can occur anytime between now and then, and Robert Mays has a few ideas, including one that would have Denver send a fifth-round pick to Carolina in exchange for left tackle Jordan Gross:

Why the Broncos should pick up the phone: With Ryan Clady done for the year, Denver’s only real weakness appears to be at left tackle. Replacement Chris Clark played very well against Lamarr Houston on Monday night, but Gross is a proven commodity. Denver has the inside track to the Super Bowl right now, and bringing in a proven left tackle as a one-year rental would be a perfect way to keep it. You can replace “Denver” with “Seattle” in that last sentence, and the point stands

Happy Tuesday, friends. We got an email from one of our readers today, by the name of Daniel Henderson. It’s easy for us to think sometimes that our reader base = our commenter base, but the reality is that for every person who comments, we have many, many regular readers who don’t.

Here’s Daniel’s question:

I was wondering if any of you guys noticed Kiszla on twitter yesterday being the only person in the media who i could find ripping hard on the non-nfl QB-ness of Pryor. Fully expected a comment somewhere today about it! All the other pundits seem very high on Pryor. Thoughts?

Happy Monday, friends. There was something subtle but important that happened in the Broncos-Giants game, and I held it out from YGS on Saturday so that we could look at it on its own, and ponder it.

Facing a 3rd-and-7 with 3:49 remaining in a game they led 38-23, the Broncos threw the football. Not only that, they got the first down.

In the playoff disaster last season, the Broncos faced a very similar situation (3rd-and-7 from the Denver 47, 2:00 to go, up 35-28), and were content to hand the ball off to Ronnie Hillman for no gain. The Broncos punted the ball, and three plays later, Jacoby Jones was in the end zone.